Philip Larkin famously said that sexual intercourse began in ānineteen sixty-three,ā and many Americans doubtless imagine that religious controversy migrated here soon after the post-coital cigarette. Jonathan Den Hartogās new book,Ā Patriotism & Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation,Ā shows that intense religious argument, particularly about infidelity, has been part of the history of the United States nearly from the start. And it only had a little to do with sex.
From the 1790s, Federalist writers worried about a migration of unbelief from Revolutionary France ā that the opera singer enthroned in the Cathedral of Notre Dame as the goddess of Reason might find sisters within New Englandās more provincial, less ornate Congregational spires. This contagion already seemed present in menacing Jeffersonian guise. (Of course, the Illuminati had to be involved as well.) Eventually, these anxious Federalists, their political options fast diminishing after 1800, started reform societies. Faith in America then became, as Den Hartog puts it, āmore individualistic, voluntaristic, and issues-orientedā ā more āevangelicalā and recognizably Victorian. American Christianity would retain its ācombativeā origins, though, in being continually defined against the threat of atheism.
The Federalist trajectory is exemplified in the career of Timothy Dwight, the Congregationalist minister whoād compared the American Revolution to the cause of Israel and envisioned the new nation as a happy New England village with ārepublican happiness sustained by Christianity.ā Then came an awareness of both the French Revolution and the menacing Democratic-Republican coalition. By 1798, Dwight, while President of Yale College, tied them all together: from Voltaire to dāAlembert to Diderot to the Illuminati to Masonic lodges. This had caused āinfidelity, irreligion, faction, rebellion, the ruin of peace, and the loss of property.ā Den Hartog gently suggests that Dwight āoverplayed [his] hand.ā
In any case, Jefferson, the Democrat-Republican, would become president. āI think N. England will be saved from ruin,ā Dwight cautiously ventured. And Jefferson was reelected. Dwightās efforts would turn towards revivals and voluntary societies that, in being local organizations connected to national bodies, looked like the Federalist Party, but were no longer political. Dwight became an officer in the American Bible Society. These voluntary societies also tended to be āevangelical,ā not strictly denominational. A pan-Protestant work of awakening and reform would be the new solution for the problem of unbelief.
Not every trajectory from ārepublican happiness sustained by Christianityā to a ācombativeā stance to the support of voluntarist groups was quite as intellectually tumultuous as Dwightās. Southern Federalists, not having religious establishments to defend like their New England counterparts, ālimited religion in their politics.ā Unitarian Federalists, being Unitarian, emphasized a moralistic order with rather less religious intensity. But, it would seem, the Federalist trajectory that Den Hartog identifies, whatever its contours, presents interesting theological problems. This is because it posits religion against atheism.
But, first, it is still unclear to me what the Federalist leaders were opposing. What did they see as āatheism?ā Was it a stable category, or did atheism inevitably lead to the āenthusiasmā of a radical sect? For instance, the South Carolina lawyer Henry William de Saussure criticized Jefferson as a āspeculative philosopher,ā and Dwight spoke of the āprideā of āspeculation,ā both seeming to softly echo Edmund Burkeās claim about the French Revolution: āThese Atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk.ā The mind can apparently genuflect before its own speculations. We might need a map of eighteenth-century political theology here.
But, in any case, America, as Amandine Barb has shown, had begun to define itself against atheism. Atheism was not merely an individual sin, but a source of pollution threatening the community itself. In 1798, John Jay, a believer in the Illuminati conspiracy (not the last believer), diagnosed a āmoral epidemicā threatening the world. Later, he claimed that the purpose of the American Bible Societies was to ācleanā the āimpurities of our moral atmosphere.ā If that is the case, though, there is a dilemma. One can believe in God to protect the community in all sincerity or to advance a partisan vision of a restored community in all deviousness.
In 1795, Jay, governor of New York, issued an official Thanksgiving Day proclamation stating that God would āreward or punishā the community based on the actions of New Yorkers. An opposing newspaper, the Aurora, called it a āparty productionā that āhas disgusted multitudes of people.ā Much later, de Tocqueville would note that āamong Anglo-Americans, there are some who profess Christian dogmas because they believe them, and others who do because they are afraid to look as though they did not believe them.ā If America is defined against infidelity, āparty productionsā and dissimulation ā and the undue suspicions of āparty productionsā and dissimulation by opposing newspapers ā are perhaps inevitable.
Worse than the danger, imagined and real, of hypocrisy is that an āotheringā of atheism can cause Americans to overlook idolatry. The theologian Jon Sobrino, among others, has suggested that idolatry is worse than atheism. After all, atheism can be a protest for life and justice. And idolatry, meaning āthe creation of divinity by humans,ā can perpetuate a lethal yet deified status quo. Southern Federalists did defend slavery; de Saussure even connected emancipation to the feared French radicalism, saying of Jefferson, “He is a philosophe ā¦. He entertains opinions unfriendly to the property which forms the efficient labor of a great part of a southern states.”
Meanwhile, the Jays opposed slavery ā even admirably so, as Den Hartog writes here about John Jayās son, William. Nevertheless, Den Hartog rightly criticizes John Jayās lifelong invocations of Providence: “Jay sacrificed his ability to maintain a critical distance from the nation ā¦. The danger of hubris and blind patriotism were extremely high.ā
It should be noted that the renowned Evangelical historian, Mark Noll, has written about the American Revolution, which Jay habitually described as Providential:
Only one population in the colonies clearly was justified by classical Christian reasoning in taking up arms to defend itself ā the half-million or so enslaved African Americans who were held in bondage as the result of armed attacks upon peaceful noncombatants.
One antidote to potentially idolatrous forms of nationalism might seem to be a denominational identity that transgresses national boundaries. Yet here, the Federalist trajectory, which ended with pan-Protestant voluntary societies, worked to cut across denominational identities. John Jayās son, William, a drafter of the constitution of the American Bible Society, entered into an eight-year debate with the Episcopalian Bishop John Henry Hobart. Hobart thought that the Bible should only be distributed in the safe company of the Book of Common Prayer; William Jay, an Episcopalian, believed that Christian reform was a site of Protestant cooperation āfor agreed-upon goals that transcended denominational identityā ā the inculcation of āan evangelical Christian identity,ā for one thing.
Den Hartog writes that here Jay āmade the clergyman character look ridiculous.ā But he later acknowledges that Hobartās complaints did have āmerits.ā For Jay, like his father, the nation still seemed to be the subject of blessing or condemnation. āOur sin will find us out,ā the anti-slavery Jay worried as Texas was annexed. While this certainly could be the impetus for reform, one still worries about the elusive āability to maintain a critical distance from the nation.ā After all, as John Fea has written, āThe Federalists were a party of big government, war, and religious establishments.ā Should the three go comfortably together?
Ironically, Den Hartog elsewhere shows that the American concern with French infidelity was hardly unique. Anti-Jacobinismās āfountainheadā was the aforementioned Edmund Burke. Timothy Dwight was āalertedā to the Illuminati controversy by the French Jesuit Abbé Barruel and the Scotsman John Robison. It is possible, however, that a concern with infidelity has persisted in America much longer than elsewhere. Amandine Barb notes that President Obamaās inclusion of ānon-believersā in his first inaugural address āmarked a noticeable evolutionā and was controversial.
And sex? Timothy Dwight did connect the French Revolution to the collapse of the family. He satirized the free love ideas of the āphilosophersā Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin in imagined dream sequences, no less. But Americans have always been arguing about religion. As Jonathan Den Hartog said in an interview:Ā āContemporary debates and arguments then should not be surprising but should be welcomed as part of an open discussion thatās built into our republic ā and has been since the beginning.āĀ And, as Jonathan Den Hartog effectively shows, it has had to do with more than sex, although sex was always part of it. Eden has always been burning.